Quotable Quotes
Wisdom

Liberation is a journey into yourself.

Mahayogi Pilotbaba

Do not store up treasures for yourselves on earth, where moths and woodworms destroy them and thieves can creak in and steal. But store up treasure for yourselves in heaven… For where your treasure is, there will your heart also be.

Mt 6:19f

The man whose life is centred around producing, selling and consuming commodities transforms himself into a commodity

Carl Jung, 1964

Unless we regain the art of silence and insight, the ability for non activity, unless we substitute true leisure for our hectic amusements, we will destroy our culture and ourselves…Leisure that allows time for the contemplation of God. Leisure has been and always will be the first foundation of any culture.

Joseph Pieper, ‘The Basis of Culture’

There are saints and monks and other people who, in one sense were unemployed, but they were very intensely employed in the spiritual sense. Contemplation is especially an Indian tradition. But the West in the past few centuries has deliberately turned away from this and has become extraverted. We have turned to quest of the material nature, and have therefore become very rich in the material sense. But we are poor spiritually.

Arnold Toynbee

Brahmarpanam Brahmamavir
Brahmangnan Brahmanabutam
Brahmaiva tena gantavyam
Brahma Karma Samadhinah

He, Brahman, is the sacrifice,
The fire, and the worshipper,
Whoever is aware of him
Gains freedom and attains to me.

Bhagvad Gita

If it has not been for the law, I should not have known sin

St Paul from Romans 7:7

But if you are led of the Spirit, you are not under the law

Golatians 5:18

Kshina-vritter abhijatasyeva maner grahitri-grahana-grahyeshu tatstha-tadanjanata samapattih

When the modifications of the mind vanish, it becomes like a transparent crystal, attaining the power of transformation (samapatti), taking on the colour of what it rests on, whether it be the cogniser, the cognised or the act of cognition.

What is the meaning of the journey?
Seeking the truth and practising compassion
That is the meaning of the journey

From the Tibetan book of the dead

Before enlightenment – chop wood and carry water
After enlightenment – chop wood and carry water

Zen saying

What can be said but not practised, better left unsaid,
What can be practised but not spoken off, better left unpractised.

Zen saying

I know millions of people who want to be gurus, but who wants to be a disciple?

Ramakrishna

One may cast into the river a ton of thoughts and cling to an ounce of practice

Traditional Indian

But, to achieve the marvellous, it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought

Jitterbug Perfume, Tom Robbins

There are two witnessing stages: Beingness witnesses all manifestation; witnessing of this beingness – consciousness, happens to that eternal principle, the Absolute.

Sri Nisargadatha Maharaj

Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.

Lincoln

I sound my barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world.

Walt Whitman

Two roads diverged in the woods,
I have taken the one less travelled by and that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost

From within the place where we are convinced of being right
No flowers will ever grow in springtime.

Yehuda Amichai

The attempts to prove God’s existence by dialectical arguments as an inference from the existing world … (are) ultimately, a non sequitur. Every effort to probe God’s nature… is a sterile endeavour, a presumption, and represents a kind of spiritual idolatry. We know God primarily through faith, in response to the prompting of the heart. It is only on the level of primitivism that we focus on God as an essence, an entity, apart of the world. As we rise towards maturity our focus shifts from a preoccupation with God as a separate entity to divine ideals, which emanates from God and seek embodiment in the structures of life.

Ben Zion Boxer

In the Light of the mighty idea of the unity of existence, there is eliminated the problem of self-love, which some have made into the source of all sin, and others into the source of all morality. There is only love for all things, which is in truth an enlightened, a nobler kind of self-love. The distorted love that loves only the puny spark, seen in our myopic vision and hates the authentic love – this is a kind of blindness that is foolish as it is wicked.

Avraham Yitzchak Kook, ‘Sacred Lights’

Suffering is the result of ignorance… and ignorance in essence, is the belief in a truly existing self and in the solidity of phenomenon.

M. Ricard, ‘The Monk and the Philosopher’

He who wants to be good, knocks at the gate
He who loves, finds the door open.

Rabindarnath Tagore

How can we determine whether a person is holy or not? When one come in contact with a real saint, without fail, his or her influence will increase one’s hunger for God. And this hunger for God is an ingredient needful for realisation of God.

Elizabeth Harding

The thought manifests as the word:
The word manifests as the deed
The deed develops into habit:
And habit hardens into character.
Therefor, watch the thought and its ways with care
And let it spring from love born out of concern for all beings.

The Buddha

Wisdom teaches me I am nothing
Love teaches me I am everything
Between these two pole my life flows.

Sri Nisargadatha Maharaj

It is very difficult to explain this feeling to anyone who is without it… The individual feels the nothingness of human desires and aims, and the sublimity and marvellous order, which reveals themselves both in nature, and in the world of thought. He looks upon the individual existence as a sort of a prison and wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole.

Albert Einstein on the nature of mystical experience

Lord, make me a vessel of your peace
Where there is hate, bring love
Where there is perjury, bring pardon
Where there is doubt, bring faith
Where there is despair, bring hope
Where there is darkness, bring light
Where there is sadness, bring joy.

St Francis of Assisi

A butterfly comes, the flower opens
The flower opens, a butterfly comes.

Ryokan

We can’t get ‘it’ the way we wanted, or we would have done ‘it’ by now…

Yanai Polenchik